John McCain appears on NBC's Today Show

If you didn't catch NBC's Today Show this morning, you missed John McCain making a lot of sense--nothing unusual there. Remember--Obama opposed the troop surge that McCain first championed.

NBC's Meredith Vieira: "You have been tough on Senator Obama. You have questioned his judgment on foreign policy, called him naive and his trip little more than a campaign rally overseas. So, given what you have seen and heard over the past few days, do you still hold to that assessment?"

John McCain: "I'm glad that Senator Obama is going to get a chance for the first time to sit down with General David Petraeus and understand what the surge was all about. Why it succeeded. And why we are winning the war and that is because we carried out a strategy which has succeeded and Senator Obama rallied against, voted against, and used his opposition to the surge as a way of gaining the nomination of his party. I hope he will have a chance to admit that he badly misjudged the situation, and he was wrong when he said that the surge wouldn't work. It has succeeded and we're winning the war. I think it's important that the American people know that that is the situation. I have mentioned general Petraeus, yes."

Vieira: "I'm bringing him up because he told the AP on Saturday that al-Qaeda may be shifting its base back to Afghanistan and then on Sunday Barack Obama reiterated his belief that Afghanistan is the central front in the war on terrorism. Do you agree with that?"

John McCain: "I agree with General Petraeus when he said Iraq was the central battleground in the war in the struggle against al-Qaeda and he said that repeatedly. And I agree with him when he said we will be able to withdraw troops as conditions on the ground dictate, not to do what Senator Obama wanted to do which was that we would be out by last March and never have had the surge and the success. And you can't choose to lose a war in Iraq in my view in order to win in Afghanistan. Of course we have problems in Afghanistan and as we succeed in Iraq there will be troops available to go to Afghanistan, but it's more than just troops. Senator Obama doesn't understand that it is a strategy, the same strategy that succeeded in Iraq, we will employ in Afghanistan, the one that he rejected and still does not accept the success of."

More from McCain on Today...

And by the way, we would have been out (of Iraq) last march if Senator Obama's original wish would have been called for. Not 16 months from now, but last March. He was wrong on the surge, he was wrong today when he says it didn't succeed. And obviously we have challenges in Afghanistan which will require more troops and more NATO participation, but we can win. If we had lost in Iraq, we would have risked a much wider war that would have put enormous challenges and burdens on our military."

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